Elemental Mind

The essential primer for understanding awakening in the Ch’an Buddhist tradition.

After four decades translating, contemplating, and writing about the classic texts in China’s Taoist and Ch’an traditions, David Hinton clearly and directly explains the essentials: meditation and awakening. He follows a single period of meditation, tracing the insights that it reveals one after another, step by step, slowly gathering them together until we find ourselves in the midst of awakening.

Little is said about Ch’an awakening. It is normally left unaddressed as some ineffable state one can know only after long practice, something beyond words and explanations. But here, in plainspoken prose, Hinton describes awakening itself in all its dimensions as elemental mind: consciousness free of the self-enclosed center of identity, wide open and integral to the vast processes of earth and Cosmos. Along the way, he shows how our minds are empty in nature, how thought is the Cosmos contemplating itself, how we possess a primordial kinship with earth that entails an environmental ethic of responsibility, how earth’s beauty is the most profound of teachers, and much more. Hinton reveals all this to be surprisingly simple—simple and yet breathtaking in the transformative wonders it opens.